It's Springtime

Armstrongist Minister Just After Coming Out Of Hibernation
Armstrongist Minister Just After Coming Out Of Hibernation

And you know what that means: Armstrongist leaders come out of hibernation after a brief winter respite to grouch about stupid stuff that doesn’t mean a thing to anyone but them — it’s embarrassing as they come loaded for bear to bare their grouchy opinions of what’s wrong with the world. It gets to be unbearable.

They quickly get their bearings and start bearing down on their prey:

Armstrong Ministers Quickly Find Their Bearings
Armstrong Ministers Quickly Find Their Bearings

It isn’t long that they are all grumpy about rabbits:

Bunny With Eggs
Bunny With Eggs

They can’t bear the thought that people would ever think that bunnies would lay eggs — and not just eggs in some cases, but chocolate eggs — so they come out with The Plain Truth About Easter, baring their souls and insisting that Easter is pagan and that bunnies can’t lay eggs. This is silly of course because no one really thinks that bunnies lay eggs (wink, wink). It’s all part of the fun of spring time and there are fun social customs associated with the spring equinox that have a long tradition of history. There are even Easter Egg Hunts on the White House Lawn. This drives the grumps of Armstrongism to despair. They just can’t bear the thought that something was so, so, so… Pagan, could ever be part of any sort of Christian associated practice.

It’s silly of course. No one really believes that bunnies lay eggs and in the scheme of things it’s pretty harmless. Of much more concern is the fact that until Easter no one can wear white.

This is a big time of year for the Armstrongists as they bang the drum to drum up business based on, well, it’s so wrong! They are so obsessed about this that they have booklets decrying the practices of what they view to be deeply rooted in paganism.

After this, they settle down a bit for awhile and have some pretty barren months until the long hot summer is over (winter south of the Equator) and fall sets in. Then they start in again with their rants about Holydays or Holidays, which is rather ironic because the only real holiday in the United States around that time is Labor Day, which, if you think about it is kind of a misnomer, since people don’t generally work on that day and take it off: You’d think that’s a day they would work, since it’s Labor Day… get it? What they are aiming for is to expound the message of the Feast of Tabernacles to declare that an ancient Bronze Age observance of physical rituals by Israelites (who didn’t actually keep it centuries at a time) some how pictures Christ reigning a thousand years with a rod of iron, which he is just going to hand over to them so they can abuse people, not realizing that no one can really keep the Feasts, since there is no temple, no altars, no Levite priests to offer animal heave offerings and no Sanhedrin to keep the whole thing together, not to mention which, the Jews themselves know their calendar for the schedule of keeping these things is wrong but they can’t fix it because they haven’t had a Sanhedrin for something going on 1,700 hundred years or more. One wonders how physical rituals given to a physical people who didn’t have the Holy Spirit could actually be all that spiritual when practiced in the 21st centuries supposedly by Christians, albeit, Olde Testament Christian Pharisees. Of course, one of the things they don’t mention up front as part of their sales package is the Day of Atonement, which, calling it a feast is sort of stretch, but given that United declared recently that old and infirm people can eat and drink on that Day because of health reasons, there may not be as much a tough sell on the matter.

Things go on after the Feast without too much major maladjustment up until right around Thanksgiving, then they unleash again about all the pagan practices of Christmas and New Years. This is rather ironic, because behind the scenes, these people use the Winter Solstice holidays to have their happy time of their Winter Festival, which is sort of like the Feast, but not really and sort of like Christmas / New Years and more really. Of course, there’s some dissent by some objecting to the obvious cognitive dissonance of keeping worldly holidays in much the same way and in the same convention centers used by the great unwashed pagan Christians who do keep Christmas and Easter. It would be interesting to check for sure, but it is probably the case that the drinking patterns of the two are probably very similar, except the Armstrongists may have an edge.

It is shortly after this point that the Armstrongists go into their dank caves to hibernate until it’s spring again, only to start the cycle all over again.

Of course, these particular creatures may have meetings. They don’t always agree — especially when they are of different social groups competing for the same resources:

Armstrongist Ministers Disagree At Conference
Armstrongist Ministers Disagree At Conference

Something about baring their teeth, but I won’t go there.

Of course, we can do a lot to fix this problem. It’s an environmental issue. First of all, there are too many of these creatures for a sustainable ecology. They war over turf. There’s not only not enough to go around, but you’d be surprised how much litter they leave in their wake. The booklets and magazines don’t always get recycled and it’s a real problem for the environment. There’s another problem: They produce toxic waste and much of their material is from recycled garbage. If it looks familiar, you’ve seen it all before.

Now some who are not familiar with this species may wonder about the issues presented here. It’s wild and crazy out there. Sometimes you have to know where to look. Often you need to be vigilant to be careful you don’t broach their feeding grounds. If any need assistance, Google should be able to help. They should be avoided at all costs.

There is only one way to be sure to control their numbers: Don’t feed them. The best thing to do is starve them of tithes and they will move on to greener pastures… so to speak:

Please Don't Feed The Bears
Take away their tithes!

12 Replies to “It's Springtime”

  1. If Armstrongism were a disease, we would have to be thankful that it is no longer spreading. In fact, you might say that the majority of its members are in quarantine! Compared to the 1950s and ’60s, this belief system has been contained and marginalized. Still doesn’t help if you have relatives practicing it, but it isn’t as bad as it could be.

    BB

  2. I contracted it as a childhood illness. I got it from my parents. They’re still laid up with it.

    We can also be thankful that once you’ve contracted the disease, and recovered, since it has a limited ability to mutate, most people have a natural immunity to it and can’t catch it again. And since people mutate faster than the disease, most people these days are already immune to it.

    Survival of the fittest, I guess.

  3. I caught the virus ‘The World Tomorrow’ from my old Motorola. I found that after destroying the device and placing small chunks of the cabinet in the garbage toter every week for the period of a month, the healing began. Took several years to heal. Worse that having VD. At least that can be cured in short order.

  4. Definitely off on a tangent, but as I was perusing a list of collective nouns (as in shoal of fish, mob of kangaroos) I wondered if any have been suggested for COG ministers – or other COG-related persons such as false prophet?

    1. Methinks probably something predatory or with a bad bite or sting…

      pack (wolves, weasels)
      swarm or hive (bees)
      pride (lions)
      ambush (tigers)
      shiver (sharks)
      congregation (alligators)
      generation (vipers)
      coil (rattlesnakes)
      committee (vultures in trees)
      wake (vultures feeding)
      cloud (bats)
      scourge (mosquitoes)

      Honorable mentions:
      deceit (lapwing)
      plague (locusts)

      Or we could go with something original:
      A “tithe” of ministers?
      An “entitlement” of ministers?

  5. A Psychopath of Armstrongists –

    along with a Clutch of Coworkers, and a Dupe of COG Members.

    There could be some standard units of measurement, such as historical distortion in megaHoehs, prophetic significance in microThiels…

  6. “…a dope of ACoG Members…”

    Sounds okay at a couple of levels, as Marx wrote “the opium of the masses”.

    And a grift of ACoG ministers, a flop of false prophets, an illume of ex-members?

  7. Well if the rest of the world had the balls to refute easter and xmas and so on then people would feel less attracted to Armstrong in the first place.

  8. Yes, lionel, there isn’t a Santa Claus.

    With the proliferation of information, Armstrongism has lost its edge. I saw a Southern Baptist minister refute Easter (while claiming the word’s use in the KJV was a reference to the pagan holiday, and not Passover).

    The same minister denounced Christmas, then his adult son injected a happy “Yeah! Christmas!”, which highlighted the other side of HWA’s old wedgies: Who cares?

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